Heft - ith

We know to what extent (artistic and not only artistic) works exceed the
boundaries of the author's creation. They always entail flight lines, margins
that cannot be bridled into a unitary conception. The notion of author is
highly problematic. 5 We are confronted with a work producing percepts
and affects. 6 We are affected by it. Faced with Rossella’s work, one feels,
from time to time, a note of melancholy emerging here and there as a constant
leitmotiv. This has nothing to do with any pessimistic conception of
life. It is not at all a question of pessimism or optimism. It is a question,
rather, of an emotive affection enveloping you; the same, let me say, you
experience when faced with the great works of Primo Levi or Robert
Antelme. One knows, their work does not deal at all with the idea of a (bad)
nature of human beings. And it’s known that they are not at all trying to say
that we all are and were equally responsible for what has happened. Nonetheless,
shame is felt at crimes perpetrated against other human beings: you
feel shame at your powerlessness to prevent that such events took place. You
feel shame at the small compromises you are obliged to make every day in
order to survive. This draws a kind of «grey zone», as Primo Levi says,
enveloping you and the whole of mankind; a grey zone that will no more
leave you, that inexorably accompanies you from morning to night, from
life to death. It is the shame you feel because you know how the machine
functions and, nonetheless, you still let it go on.
To be sure: Rossella does not tell the story of an omnipresent power that
incessantly overwhelms us from morning till night. It is not a question of
repression or of an age of terror. To believe that society works, since people
ignore how it functions, would be as misleading as the idea that it functions
since everybody knows how powerful its mechanisms of control are. Neither
ignorance nor excess of knowledge explains what allows society to get
gathered.
When we look at this work, we understand that mechanisms of power
are more effective and subtle than we can believe. Tiny lines of power do not
stop crossing society at different levels. There are not only physical borders
and lines confining bodies; but also internal and external borders; prisons
can trap bodies, but can also be prisons for the soul; the Panopticon architecture
extends to the whole of society and becomes the paradigm of the
control society. We ourselves are the controllers of ourselves, even before
being (or, at any rate, at the same time) controllers of the others. Panopticon
is the first and only archaic form of social control. It is interesting that
one of the last creations of Rossella deals with a dismissed prison, with cells
in which bodies have disappeared. Such disappearance is certainly the sign
of a modification of penalty, but also the clue that the Panopticon system
spread over society as a whole. 7
If the Panopticon allows for the understanding of the mechanic functioning
of power, the fact that it works as a machine having no regard for
the subjects involved in the mechanism, means however that post-modern
societies rest on a more sophisticated procedure of control to which neoliberal
ideologies have given their broader development. Neoliberal societies
need to keep elements under control in order to ensure their free movement.
A very specific dialectic between production of freedom and control
of freedom takes here place. Neoliberal societies are avid for freedom;
therefore, liberalism consumes what it tries to produce. We are faced here
with a new governmental reason that needs freedom, on the one side, and
consumes it, on the other. And in order for it to consume freedom, it must
produce it. If, on the one side, liberalism is in search of techniques that
govern and administer life (that constantly escapes them); then on the other
side, such encompassing administration turns against itself, since the
best government is the one governing the least. The coexistence of these
two aspects of liberalism is all the more paradoxical for it leads to recurrent
crises of governmentality.
5 – See Michel Foucault, “What is an
Author?” in ID., Aesthetics, Method,
and Epistemology. Essential
Works of Foucault 1954–1984, New
York 1998, vol. II.
6 – Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari,
«Percept. Affect, and Concept»,
in: What is Philosophy?, New York
1996, Part II, chap. 7.
7 – Foucault’s analyses of the Panopticon
in Discipline and Punish, New
York 1977, are no doubt the main
reference to this topic. His analysis
of the birth of biopolitics (See
Security, territory, population.
Lectures at the Collège de France
1977-78 and The Birth of Biopolitics.
Lectures at the Collège de France
1978-79, New York 2008 and 2009)
is the necessary corollary. See also
the crucial text by Gilles Deleuze,
“Postscript on Control Society”, in:
ID., Negotiations (1972–1990), New
York 1997, p. 177–181. On these topics
Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt have recently expanded the
most: see, for instance, Commonwealth,
Cambridge (MA) 2011.
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